Lilia’s POV
Second floor of the Blackwater estate, in a room furnished simply.
I sat on a long bench, watching the man in front of me with no small alarm.
At some point he had crouched down, pulled off the heels that had nearly worn through my ability to stand, taken both my feet into his palms, and begun working his thumbs slowly into the arches.
“That…
Kael, I, I,”
”What is it?”
The two words stopped my throat.
I had no idea what to say.
I glanced at Marcus in the doorway, back to us, spine ruler-straight.
This Beta needed to say nothing , his frame alone was enough to frighten anyone.
Kael never traveled with a crowd.
Unlike Jace, who went nowhere without a swarm of attendants, he kept exactly two men near him: Derek and Marcus.
Only two…
something shifted in my mind, and the question was out before I weighed it.
“Kael.
Where’s your other Beta?”
”Derek?”
He looked up at me.
I said nothing, and he answered himself, his voice carrying something I couldn’t parse.
“He went to Jace’s territory. On business.”
Jace’s territory.
The Western Territory.
It snapped into place, and my feet jerked back out of his hands.
I glared at him, frowning.
“The Western Territory , was that you?”
Kael had no intention of hiding it.
He nodded.
“It was.
What of it?”
”What of it?
You break it and Nathan takes the blame!
The Western Territory is nothing to you , Why would you do it?”
”Because of you.” Kael leaned in over the back of the bench.
“Or would you rather I sat there and watched you play drinking games with him all night?”
So it was true.
The crease between my brows cut deeper. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
I made to get up , but one look at him, coiled and ready, told me he’d pull me back one-handed if I moved half a step.
I turned my face away, sulking.
“If this gets big and they trace it, your cooperation with Jace is finished too.”
”And if it is?” Kael looked at me sidelong, without one ounce of concern in his eyes.
“The arrangement with Jace can be voided at any time. I have never needed him.”
Half alarmed, half helpless, I stared at him.
To keep me from one thread of entanglement with Jace, he really had reached out and shattered a balance two Packs had spent years building , as if it were a glass on the edge of a table.
This man had never once played by anyone’s rules but his own.
“Is this how Alpha Kael courts people?
No restraint, no retreat, nothing held back?”
”Only you.”
His arm slid around my waist, and without asking he locked me in his arms.
I struggled, uselessly, twice, then let him hold me.
He looked down at me, voice low.
“Lilia, you are the first person I have ever gone to this much trouble to win , and the first I have ever wanted to take care of.
Do your feet still hurt?”
”…”
Something in me shivered.
I stared into those near-gold eyes.
He was too close, our breath overlapping until it caught the rhythm of my heartbeat, and my heart picked up speed and would not slow.
I made myself sound steady.
“If I said yes , would you keep going?”
”With pleasure.”
He lowered his head, lifted my ankle in his left hand, and his thumb found the exact spot the shoe had worn raw, pressing the ache loose with a slow, patient strength.
Not hard, not soft.
Exactly right.
The sting dissolved, and something warm and unnameable crept up from the sole of my foot, melting the last thread of resistance in my chest.
My body loosened without my permission.
The heat of it burned in my cheeks, and the thin dam inside me wavered.
He noticed.
The tip of his nose brushed mine.
“You’re blushing again.”
I groped for anything to break it, and my mouth fired before my brain caught up.
“Kael, your hands are so good at this , if the Pack ever fails, you could open a massage parlor, it would certainly,”
He stared at me until my skin crawled and my voice shrank to nothing, but I braced myself and finished the sentence.
“Never want for customers.”
”It’s a good idea.” Far from angry, he laughed low, and bent close, his cheek nearly brushing my lips.
“Then since you’ve enjoyed the service, pay your bill properly , my… customer.”
There it was again.
I had known this man would never manage one serious sentence in front of me.
I refused to indulge him any further.
I twisted my face away, both hands flat on his chest to push free , and he had known I would do exactly that.
His arm folded, and he pressed me back onto the bench, my waist gathered in his grip.
The gap between us , height, weight, strength , was a canyon.
Whatever I did was nothing to him.
“Don’t , no, no, no!”
I begged in a panic.
The bench had no cushion of any kind, and the back of my head was one second from cracking against the wood , when the hand at my waist shot upward and caught the back of my skull, ahead of the fall.
His knuckles and the back of his hand struck the bench hard, a dull crack of bone on wood, hard enough that my head jolted with it.
His face showed almost nothing, but it had to hurt , he was simply refusing to let it show.
I mouthed two words at him, gloating.
“Serves you right.”
He obligingly frowned, then ducked his head and buried his face against the side of my neck, some unreasonable beast following the scent along my throat, breathing me in, unhurried, thorough.
“Lilia, You’ve been making me unhappy all night.
If you don’t want to suffer for it, make it up to me.”
”Make…
make it up to you?” I frowned.
“Mm.”
His breath was scalding, and the hand that had been massaging my foot began to wander upward, carrying a danger that didn’t bother hiding itself.
Panic finally found me, but the way he had me pinned left nowhere to go, and all I could manage was a weak push at his shoulder.
“How do you want me to…
make it up?”
”Like this.”
He looked up at me, and his lips came down, closing gently over mine.
As if he had finally gotten a taste of the one thing in this world he’d wanted most, the tension went out of him.
He kissed from the center of my mouth to the corner, slow and consuming, his fingertips grazing the skin along my neck until I went soft everywhere, until his own eyes darkened with it.
Lashes lifting, he watched the flush climb my face, watched the last resistance in my eyes give way inch by inch.